A Funeral, A Name, and A Question

One Israeli immigrant mourns the tragic loss of another. A stranger, yet a sister.

by Aryeh ben Levi

The funeral should have started at 9 am but was delayed until 11 to give her parents time to arrive on a flight from their home in Paris, France. What were her parents thinking on their way to Israel? Their daughter as a teen had chosen to come and make her home here and spend the rest of her life in the land of her ancestors. The rest of her life was only two more years. Then a Palestinian bus driver plowed his 11-ton bus full speed into a crowd of people. Most of those killed were soldiers waiting at a public bus stop.

You couldn't forget her name: Judy. It may surprise some to know that the origin for the common Western name "Judy" comes from the word Judith -- in Hebrew Yehudit. Yehudit means simply a "Jew."

At many funerals, the spiritual leader and friends talk about the departed. Here the speakers talk to the departed and we got to listen in. A rabbi spoke to Judy. Her Hebrew language teacher spoke. A best friend would miss Judy as she would miss a member of her own family.

A couple who had "adopted" Judy as a new and young immigrant, spoke of "our sweetheart." The mayor of Jerusalem spoke, not for the first time at the death of a young person. This must be his toughest part of a very tough job otherwise. A fellow soldier told how Judy wanted to make the army a career and rise even to the position Chief of Staff. One got the feeling that Judy might well have achieved that goal. Judy's father somehow managed to speak a few final words to his daughter, words he must have churned over and over in his head on the flight from Paris. But his understandable sobs were inevitable.

If you wonder how many come to these funerals, let me explain. Just over a year ago there was another funeral. A young man killed in Lebanon. A half-hour before the funeral was to start I sat in a coffee shop near Mt. Herzl, the military cemetery in Jerusalem. It was raining so hard that I couldn't see the other side of the road. At first I thought that no way was I going to get drenched going to the funeral of someone I didn't even know. But then I thought, he'd been in the land only two years, and had come home to Israel from the former Soviet Union. I thought that being new to the land, the soldier had few friends and only a mother, who was flown here for her son's funeral.

I decided to go to the funeral even in the downpour. And as I came over a rise and around the corner to the burial plot, to my surprise I saw a sea of umbrellas. At least 300 people stood under those umbrellas. And every last person there was drenched from the waist down because of the icy, blowing rain which, in the course of half an hour turned to sleet and then snow. But nobody moved. The honor guard stood at attention without flinching. They were drenched from head to toe. The word "honor" has a whole new deeper meaning for me now.

All was quiet at Judy's funeral, until they started to bring the casket in. Then the weeping began. How many who wept knew Judy personally? Probably only a very few. Yet still, Judy was my sister and Judy was my daughter and Judy was the woman who would not become the mother she was meant to become. Her children and her grandchildren who might have been, wept for her.

I think of Judy' father. No father should ever have to stand over the grave of his own daughter and weep.

And I think of another father, the one who drove the bus. He has five children. He was one of 200 Arab bus drivers that Israel allowed to carry workers into jobs in Israel from Gaza. The Jews trusted this Arab. And besides, what father with children of his own could mow down and murder other children? But it happened. Can anyone tell me why? If that father were my father, what would I think about my father now? About his killing other fathers' children, children just like me?

Some hours later, Shabbat begins. Despite any pain, sorrow, or mourning, Shabbat shall always be a time of joy and rejoicing. I awake in the night. The beat of a nearby disco pounds the air. At two in the morning I go down and end up talking to a soldier on weekend leave, out of uniform. I mention that I went to Judy's funeral yesterday. The soldier reacts. Everyone in Israel knows her name and the names of the other seven murdered.

"Why did you go to her funeral?" he asks me.

"So I can remember," I answer. "Why are you here at this loud disco in the early morning of Shabbat?" I ask him.

"So I can forget," he answers.

So he can forget that we are all Judy's. We are all victims of this hate and insanity. Only that some are more victim than others. And I wonder... when will this 18-year-old and all others like him be able to go straight from high school to university or work -- without having to give three years of a life to fight the hate?

Yes, how much longer? How much longer until it is the "funeral of hate" that we shall attend? Then for once we can dance on a grave. "Violence shall no more be heard in thy land, neither wasting nor destruction." God himself "will wipe away the tears from all faces; he will remove the disgrace of his people from all the earth." Then "our mouths will be filled with laughter and our tongues with singing" and "the joy of the Almighty will be our strength."

I've been striving to get more into spirituality. But it seems that every time I make some progress, I find myself slipping right back to where I started. I'm getting discouraged and feel like a failure. Can you help?

The Aish Rabbi Replies:

Spiritual slumps are a natural part of spiritual growth. There is a cycle that people go through when at times they feel closer to God and at times more distant. In the words of the Kabbalists, it is "two steps forward and one step back." So although you feel you are slipping, know that this is a natural process. The main thing is to look at your overall progress (over months or years) and be able to see how far you've come!

This is actually God's ingenious way of motivating us further. The sages compare this to teaching a baby how to walk. When the parent is holding on, the baby shrieks with delight and is under the illusion that he knows how to walk. Yet suddenly, when the parent lets go, the child panics, wobbles and may even fall.

At such times when we feel spiritually "down," that is often because God is letting go, giving us the great gift of independence. In some ways, these are the times when we can actually grow the most. For if we can move ourselves just a little bit forward, we truly acquire a level of sanctity that is ours forever.

Here is a practical tool to help pull you out of the doldrums. The Sefer HaChinuch speaks about a great principle in spiritual growth: "The external awakens the internal." This means that although we may not experience immediate feelings of closeness to God, eventually, by continuing to conduct ourselves in such a manner, this physical behavior will have an impact on our spiritual selves and will help us succeed. (A similar idea is discussed by psychologists who say: "Smile and you will feel happy.")

That is the power of Torah commandments. Even if we may not feel like giving charity or praying at this particular moment, by having a "mitzvah" obligation to do so, we are in a framework to become inspired. At that point we can infuse that act of charity or prayer with all the meaning and lift it can provide. But if we'd wait until being inspired, we might be waiting a very long time.

May the Almighty bless you with the clarity to see your progress, and may you do so with joy.

In 1940, a boatload 1,600 Jewish immigrants fleeing Hitler's ovens was denied entry into the port of Haifa; the British deported them to the island of Mauritius. At the time, the British had acceded to Arab demands and restricted Jewish immigration into Palestine. The urgent plight of European Jewry generated an "illegal" immigration movement, but the British were vigilant in denying entry. Some ships, such as the Struma, sunk and their hundreds of passengers killed.

If you seize too much, you are left with nothing. If you take less, you may retain it (Rosh Hashanah 4b).

Sometimes our appetites are insatiable; more accurately, we act as though they were insatiable. The Midrash states that a person may never be satisfied. "If he has one hundred, he wants two hundred. If he gets two hundred, he wants four hundred" (Koheles Rabbah 1:34). How often have we seen people whose insatiable desire for material wealth resulted in their losing everything, much like the gambler whose constant urge to win results in total loss.

People's bodies are finite, and their actual needs are limited. The endless pursuit for more wealth than they can use is nothing more than an elusive belief that they can live forever (Psalms 49:10).

The one part of us which is indeed infinite is our neshamah (soul), which, being of Divine origin, can crave and achieve infinity and eternity, and such craving is characteristic of spiritual growth.

How strange that we tend to give the body much more than it can possibly handle, and the neshamah so much less than it needs!